Was Tuberculosis Born Out of Fire?
By damaging lungs and bringing people together, fire may have turned a soil microbe into a global pathogen.
Many thousands of years ago, on a chilly African night, a group of people gather around a fire in a cave. Using the flames, they cook their food, fashion new weapons, and warm themselves. But where there’s fire, there’s also smoke, and the smoke is giving the huddled humans a wretched cough. And in their inflamed airways, a microbe that normally lives in the soil is taking hold, changing, evolving into something new.
This, according to and , biologists at the University of New South Wales, is a possible origin story
